Steve Jobs, the inhumane humanist: the founder of Apple may have been a narcissistic jerk, but his humanity was revealed by the liberating objects he made.

• Author: Godwin, Mike
• Position: Steve Jobs - Book review

Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson, Simon and Schuster, 656 pages, $35

WRITING A biography of a modern public figure is harder than writing a novel. While an artist can create or abstract a narrative theme that ties all his facts together, real lives are full of distractions, narrative dead ends, inexplicable incidents, coincidences, and contradictions.

So it's no surprise that Walter Isaacson's new biography of Apple founder and serial business inventor Steve lobs, rushed into print less than a month after Jobs' death on October 5, is ultimately disappointing. Jobs is as much a mystery on the last page as he is on the first. Even those who loved or hated him the most can't quite make up their minds about him; Isaacson makes sure to let us know that Jobs' friends and family consistently acknowledged his flaws, while his opponents (Bill Gates leaps to mind) felt compelled to praise his consistent pattern of game-changing business invention.

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I keep adding the word business before invention because Jobs was not, for the most part, a technically proficient man. Early in Isaacson's book, we witness Jobs finishing assembly work on the motherboards of the first Apple computers. It is the last time we see him playing a hands-on role in making something electronic. He wasn't an inventor, but he was no mere businessman either; we don't exactly have a word for what Steve Jobs was, and Isaacson is as much at a loss as the rest of us. How do you describe a man who is responsible for the fact that the Mac-BookAir I am typing on right now is completely silent? There are no fans in Apple u computers or early Macs. Why? Because Jobs thought they were noisy, unpleasant distractions, even though without fans computers tend to overheat.

This isn't to say that Walter Isaacson, a veteran journalist whose biographies of Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, Henry Kissinger, and others have been consistently praised for their care and scholarship, skimped on Steve Jobs. He gets a lot of things right, most notably the irrelevance of Jobs' lack of technical chops. What did matter was the entrepreneur's insistent drive to make better things--not just a computer "for the rest of us," but also a music player, a phone, a personal digital all-purpose tool. Jobs didn't invent any of these devices; he just shepherded the invention of the versions you might want to own. Henry Ford, after all, didn't invent the automobile; what he did was put an affordable...